Exchange 2016: Database Size Limit

If you thought database size limit has been removed from Exchange 2016/2013 standard then you were wrong. Let me share more clarity on it.

This is no other blog or TechNet link talking about this limit. I have spent few hours in searching the limit for the Exchange 2016 database.

As you know I deal with all kind of customers from SMB to Enterprise and this time it was SMB customer. We deployed and migrated everything to Exchange 2016. Total time spent was 24 hours and 35 minutes for this migration. Customer migrated all users except the pilot batch.

Post migration during the final review we found event id 40011 which told us that there is a 1TB limit on the databases. So Standard license can give you the maximum of 5x1TB Size Databases. It means total 5TB.

Note The database maximum size is hard-coded as 1,024 GB in the event, even though you may have changed it to a higher value in the registry.

Now we check the registry key but there was no server name key present. So, to move forward, we created 2nd database and suggested the customer to move some of the mailboxes. We were lucky that this customer was using only one database so he has 4TB available. To be on the safer side, we had also created the registry key with 2048 GB (2 TB). If you go back and see the event, it had already passed 1024 GB which is the limit but the database was mounted. 🙂

After some search, I found the following link which is talking about the Exchange 2013. End story, you are reading this as a news for Exchange 2016.

I didn’t stop here and wrote to Nino Bilic at Microsoft PG team. He has confirmed that same applies for Exchange 2016 as well and he has filed a bug to get Exchange 2016 added in the applies to of the above support link.

Question: Did I remind you Exchange 2003 SP2? Please write in comments if I did.

Nino Bilic set the right expectation to be corrected by EOW and it was updated on 8/4/2017

Well,
That’s not exactly hard-coded limit. It’s not like back in Exchange 2000 version where database will dismount if it reached 16GB. I’m not even talking about Exchange 2003, where you could simply adjust the reg key to get the DB to 75GB.

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